Ubuntu Font Family Licensing FAQ

Stylistic Foundations

The Ubuntu Font Family is the first time that a libre
typeface has been designed professionally and explicitly
with the intent of developing a public and long-term community-based
development process.

When developing an open project, it is generally necessary to
have firm foundations: a font needs to maintain harmony within
itself even across many type designers and writing
systems. For the Ubuntu Font Family, the process has been
guided with the type foundry Dalton Maag setting the project up with
firm stylistic foundation covering several left-to-right scripts:
Latin, Greek and Cyrillic; and right-to-left scripts: Arabic and
Hebrew (due in 2011).

With this starting point the community will, under the
supervision of Canonical and Dalton Maag, be able to build on the
existing font sources to expand their character
coverage. Ultimately everybody will be able to use the Ubuntu
Font Family in their own written languages across the whole of
Unicode (and this will take some time!).

Licensing

The licence chosen by any free software project is one of the
foundational decisions that sets out how derivatives and
contributions can occur, and in turn what kind of community will
form around the project.

Using a licence that is compatible with other popular licences is
a powerful constraint because of
the network
effects: the freedom to share improvements between projects
allows free software to reach high-quality over
time. Licence-proliferation leads to many incompatible licences,
undermining the network effect, the freedom to share and ultimately
making the libre movement that Ubuntu is a part of less
effective. For all kinds of software, writing a new licence
is not to be taken lightly and is a choice that
needs to be thoroughly justified if this path is taken.

Today it is not clear to Canonical what the best licence for a
font project like the Ubuntu Font Family is: one that starts life
designed by professionals and continues with the full range of
community development, from highly commercial work in new directions
to curious beginners' experimental contributions. The fast and
steady pace of the Ubuntu release cycle means that an
interim libre licence has been necessary to enable
the consideration of the font family as part of Ubuntu 10.10
operating system release.

Before taking any decision on licensing, Canonical as sponsor and
backer of the project has reviewed the many existing licenses used
for libre/open fonts and engaged the stewards of the most popular
licenses in detailed discussions. The current interim
licence is the first step in progressing the
state-of-the-art in licensing for libre/open font development.

The public discussion must now involve everyone in the
(comparatively new) area of the libre/open font community; including font
users, software freedom advocates, open source supporters and
existing libre font developers. Most importantly, the minds
and wishes of professional type designers considering entering the
free software business community must be taken on board.

Conversations and discussion has taken place, privately, with
individuals from the following groups (generally speaking personally
on behalf of themselves, rather than their affiliations):

Document embedding

One issue highlighted early on in the survey of existing font
licences is that of document embedding. Almost all font
licences, both free and unfree, permit embedding a font into a
document to a certain degree.
Embedding a font with other works that make
up a document creates a "combined work" and copyleft would normally
require the whole document to be distributed under the terms of the
font licence. As beautiful as the font might be, such a licence
makes a font too restrictive for useful general purpose digital
publishing.

The situation is not entirely unique to fonts and is encountered
also with tools such as GNU Bison: a vanilla GNU GPL licence would
require anything generated with Bison to be made available
under the terms of the GPL as well. To avoid this, Bison
is published
with an additional permission to the GPL which allows the output
of Bison to be made available under any licence.

The conflict between licensing of fonts and licensing of
documents, is addressed in two popular libre font licences, the SIL
OFL and GNU GPL:

GPL
Font Exception: The situation is resolved by granting
an additional permission to allow documents to not be
covered by the GPL. (The exception is being reviewed).

The Ubuntu Font Family must also resolve this conflict, ensuring
that if the font is embedded and then extracted it is once again
clearly under the terms of its libre licence.

Long-term licensing

Those individuals involved, especially from Ubuntu and Canonical,
are interested in finding a long-term libre licence that finds broad
favour across the whole libre/open font community. The deliberation
during the past months has been on how
to licence the Ubuntu Font Family in the short-term, while
knowingly encouraging everyone to pursue a long-term
goal.

Copyright
assignment will be required so that the Ubuntu Font
Family's licensing can be progressively expanded to one (or more)
licences, as best practice continues to evolve within the libre/open
font community.

Canonical will support and fund legal work on
libre font licensing. It is recognised that the cost and
time commitments required are likely to be significant. We
invite other capable parties to join in supporting this
activity.

The GPL version 3 (GPLv3) will be used for Ubuntu Font Family
build scripts and the CC-BY-SA for associated documentation and
non-font content: all items which do not end up embedded in general
works and documents.

Ubuntu Font Licence

For the short-term only, the initial
licence is the Ubuntu Font License
(UFL). This is loosely inspired from the work on the
SIL OFL 1.1, and seeks to clarify the issues that arose during
discussions and legal review, from the perspective of the backers,
Canonical Ltd. Those already using established licensing models such as the
GPL, OFL or Creative Commons licensing should have no worries
about continuing to use them. The Ubuntu Font Licence (UFL) and the SIL
Open Font Licence (SIL OFL) are not identical and should not be confused with each
other. Please read the terms precisely. The UFL is only intended as an
interim license, and the overriding aim is to support the creation
of a more suitable and generic libre font licence. As soon as such a
licence is developed, the Ubuntu Font Family will migrate to
it—made possible by copyright assignment in the
interium. Between the OFL 1.1, and the UFL 1.0, the following
changes are made to produce the Ubuntu Font Licence: